


Wild Youth

by rufeepeach



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: 1500 follower thank you, F/M, neverland au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-03
Updated: 2013-11-03
Packaged: 2017-12-31 08:00:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1029249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rufeepeach/pseuds/rufeepeach
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Belle is Peter’s and the Lost Boys’ “Mother," beloved and needed, and so it's natural for her to care for Rumple, the newest and most timid of the boys. But feelings in Neverland are hard to hide, and everyone grows up sometime.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wild Youth

**Author's Note:**

> Repeatinglitanies on Tumblr made the best prompts, thank you! Written for my 1500 follower celebration :D

The new boy didn’t talk much.

Peter had given him a stick for a sword and a sheet of tree bark for a shield, but the boy was too busy quivering like a bowl of calf’s jelly to so much as lift the thing. He was left with a nasty bruise to the cheekbone, and Peter sneered at him as he walked away.

This did happen, sometimes, Belle knew, and she knew her part also. Some boys had faced horrors in their former homes that had broken their spirits, left them quite unable to immediately embrace the life of cavalier freedom that Peter had granted them. They needed kindness first, sweet embraces and kind words, and then gently, slowly, they could grow to be strong, brave boys. Curly had begun that way, and Tommo, and they had grown to become Peter’s closest and most trusted friends.

The broken boys needed to know that Neverland was a place where any dream could come true, those of love as well as any other.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured, as she pressed a cold cloth from her wooden bowl to the new boy’s cheek. “It’ll get easier.”

“No it won’t, ma’am,” he denied, softly, and her heart broke for the hopelessness there.

“Hush now, I’m no ma’am, there are no ma’am’s here,” she admonished. She pulled herself up straight, and smoothed down her blue patchwork skirt, “Do I look like a ma’am to you?”

“You’re older than me,” the boy argued, but timidly, shrinking back as if he expected a scolding slap. 

“How old am I?” she asked, curiously. She smoothed the cloth across his bruise slowly, soothingly.

“I- I don’t know, ma- miss,” he stammered, “Twelve?”

She laughed, lightly, “Eleven, but nice guess,” she praised, “you’re a clever one.”

The boy gave her the shyest of smiles at that, “My da used to say I was too clever by half,” he confided, and then the smile was gone as quickly as it had come. 

“Used to?” Belle asked, gently, “What happened?”

“He was a coward,” the boy snarled, and Belle was pleased by the steel in his voice, as saddened as she was by the anger there. Peter would be happy that there was some bite in this one after all, but Belle wouldn’t be here if she felt the same. It wasn’t her place to feel the same. She was the boys’ Mother, there to tend their cuts and bruises, clean their scabbed knees and fill their aching bellies. She was there to nurture while Peter inspired and challenged, dared them to become what they could be.

That was how he’d put it, anyway, when she’d asked him why he’d at last taken a girl after centuries of small boys. Because girls are soft and smell sweet, he’d said, and sometimes even a hard, sharp little warrior needs a warm bed.

“And?” she prompted, “What became of him?”

“What always becomes of cowards?” he sniffed, as if that answered it, but his high, reedy little voice quavered. “He died.”

“I’m sorry,” she put a hand on his shoulder, but he shrugged it off.

“Don’t be. He’s gone; he’s not coming back. But…”

“But?” her hand crept back to his shoulder, and this time he let it rest there. 

“But…” he turned to her, wide brown eyes full of tears, “What if I’m like him?” he begged, “What if…” he sniffed, hard, and his tears began to fall, dripping down his wide, dirty cheeks and onto the earth between them, “What if Peter doesn’t want me anymore, because I’m a coward?”

“Oh, darling,” Belle whispered, and wrapped her arm fully around, inviting the boy to cuddle close to her, his head on her thin shoulder. “You are only what you believe yourself to be, in Neverland. Here I am a Mother because I say I am, and you can be a hero if you just believe it.”

“You’re a mother?” he asked, “But you’re just a girl!”

“I’ve been here a long time,” she told him, gently, “the boys here have no other mother.” She paused, and watched him carefully, before whispering against the top of his dirty, matted hair, “I can be your mother too, if you’d like?”

“My mother died,” he insisted, but he didn’t sound like he was refusing her offer. “I never knew her.”

“We can pretend,” she promised, “and here that’s the same as it being real. Pretend to be a hero until you are one; pretend you have a mother until you don’t need me anymore.”

He sighed, and nodded, and settled quieter against her. Finally, she realised something else. “What is your name?”

“Rumple,” he said, softly.

“Mine’s Belle,” she told him, and he made a satisfied little noise as he rested his head on her shoulder, and her arm squeezed him softly, affectionately.

\---

Rumpelstiltskin was one of Peter’s wild cards: the game just wasn’t interesting without a surprise or two.

The boy was from the Enchanted Forest, not the usual magicless land Peter sent the Shadow out to, but that mattered little. He’d believed so hard in magic, this one: the son of a coward but with such delicious potential. His skin practically glowed with it, his little soul full to brimming with his possibilities, with what he could become. Peter didn’t know yet where he’d end up, but he’d been impossible to resist.

He had grown close to Belle, but that mattered little either. Most of the boys bonded closely with one or two others, or with Belle, or even with Peter occasionally. It made everything more interesting, the constant game of alliances and friendships and rivalries, and all of them constantly in flux, capable of shifting at one meaningful glance, one whisper in the forest when Peter caught someone alone. 

Donny and James had been close for a while, until Peter sent them both into the woods, and told them that only the first one to find the new campsite would be allowed to remain. Watching them sabotage one another, chase and hide and search, scrambling and terrified as rabbits, was a marvellous day of fun.

He’d allowed the loser back, in the end, but only once Donny had been in the woods for a few days, and had to deal away his favourite bow and arrow for the privilege of returning. The boys now did not speak, not unless Peter made them. That was another kind of game.

But Rumpelstiltskin didn’t like any of the other boys: he only liked Belle. The problem with that being the same problem that had stopped Peter bringing girls along in the first place: they liked each other too much, and he couldn’t hurt a girl.

Not in any interesting way, anyway. Belle was too calm, too sweet-mannered, and too honest: any niggling doubt she would brush off or confront directly; any game he tried to push her into she would ask him calmly why he wished to play and how it could be avoided. And the boys all loved her: she was their Mother. Peter loved her too, since he was one of the boys after all, and she mended his skinned knees and sewed his tunics as much as she did anyone else’s.

“You can have him,” he said, at last, one day. The boys were collecting food or sharpening their spears, and Belle and Peter were alone, back from the fire. He had tried to startle her, but she was apparently unflappable. She still looked like a little girl of eleven, but her eyes were as old as his.

“What?” she asked, as her eyebrow rose to match his own. Too clever by half: he should have taken a softer girl, one without her pointed bird-bones, her bright eyes and curious wit. But he’d been whimsical and wanted a princess to play his would-be knights off against, and so a princess he had stolen.

“Rumple,” Peter said, and couldn’t keep the irritation from his voice, “If you like him so much, he can be your pet.”

“I like all of you,” she said, richly, warmly, and it was a lie. Peter liked lies, liked liars, but she wasn’t meant to lie. Mothers didn’t lie, she wasn’t playing the game right, she was cheating, and Peter didn’t like cheaters. “Peter, what’s the matter?”

“I’m giving you a present,” he snickered, smirked, “Girls like presents, don’t they Belle?”

“You can’t give me a person, Peter,” she chided, gently, “it’s very sweet, but no.”

“Why not?” he asked, “I took him, he’s mine, I can do what I want with him. He calls you Mother, so have him as your own.”

“Peter,” she stepped forward, put a soft hand to his cheek. She had to reach, her body so tiny compared to his lanky frame, but she could still make him feel like the little boy he claimed to be. “I’m your Mother, too. Rumple needs a little more support sometimes, but I love you all. There’s no need for all of this. I know really you only want the best for us all.”

She was still cheating, he thought angrily, using grown-ups’ tricks – perception, persuasion, love – for her weapons. It wasn’t fair, it was all wrong, but he liked that: Belle was another wild card, and the game was just getting interesting.

So he hid his anger, and smiled, the sweet, docile smile she wanted from him. She was as sweet as a mermaid and twice as cruel, and that was why she was still here, for all she liked to play the part, for all she wanted everyone to see her kindness and not her bitter edge.

Belle had always been too old for her skin, but then so had Peter. And now there was a new game afoot.

\---

Rumple was starting to grow.

He could feel it, the hairs on his head growing longer and shaggy for the first time in an eternity, his limbs developing too so that he was soon as tall as any of the other boys. He counted his years, and realised that when he left home for Neverland he was twelve years old, on the verge of leaving his boyhood… but it had been decades since then, and he did not become a man. He was still a boy, but now a boy with longer hair and more agile limbs, and he hoped no one would notice.

Except Belle; Belle could notice, if she liked.

He’d called her ‘Mother’ since his first days in Neverland, but the word no longer seemed at all appropriate. He called her Belle, at last, and her eyes brightened when he did, and he liked that. He didn’t need a mother so much as a friend, and she had always been his only friend. He was still afraid of Peter; for all that he was not afraid so much of anything else now, but Belle wasn’t. Belle was never scared of anything.

Belle was also growing, a little, he realised. Her limbs were filling out as his were, but not with length and bone so much as a little more flesh on her shoulders, across her chest where her deep blue tunic covers her to the collarbones, and further down, too. Rumple didn’t look further down anymore, although he never used to care one way or the other. Now, though, now he very carefully didn’t look. When he did, he tended to get all red and hot.

Belle smiled, though, when she caught him once or twice. It was a new smile, flushed and pretty and shy, and all of a sudden he would realise that she was only eleven when she arrived here, almost a woman by his village’s standards.

That suddenly started to matter: the distinction between ‘girl’ and ‘woman’, perhaps even more than between ‘boy’ and ‘man’. But the distinction always came with a little rush of fear, because men could not run with Peter Pan, just as women were never taken to Neverland at all.

And the other boys… the other boys had started to notice.

“Belle’s getting fat!” Curly said to Felix, one evening, “Is she stealing all the food?”

“Don’t say that too loudly,” Felix snickered, “You’ll upset Rumple.”

“Everything upsets Rumple,” Curly groused, not understanding the joke, “Look, he’s sulking right now.”

“No, he’s not,” Felix smirked, and put a finger to his lips, “Watch.”

“What is he doing then?” Curly whispered.

“Waiting,” Felix answered, “he thinks we can’t see him.”

“What’s he waiting for?” Curly asked, curiously, “Next patrol’s not back for another hour!”

“Belle,” Felix replied, softly, with the quiet malice of one who enjoys the anticipation of another’s downfall, smiling and breathless. Rumple’s heart nearly stopped, but he didn’t turn, didn’t give away that he could hear them in the treetops, spying on him. “Here she comes, see?”

And indeed, there she came. They always met here, just out of convenience, to catch up on the day’s events and talk as privately as one could, on an island that was entirely in the thrall of a boy whose senses they had to evade. Rumple didn’t know when friendship had become furtive and clandestine, but he thought it had happened somewhere between the new length in his limbs, and Belle starting to hold his hand almost thoughtlessly whenever they sat close to each other.

“Shout at me,” he murmured, as she moved to sit. She froze, and he quickly signed danger to her with the hand hidden from their watchers’ sight. 

Her raised eyebrow asked why, he replied with a sharp, slight glance up to the treetops. 

“You stole my ribbon again!” she screeched, at the top of her lungs, and kicked hard at his shin, “You thieving wretch, weave your own!”

He made motions to defend himself, before finally allowing her to chase him into the woods, and circle around to re-enter the campsite on another side. Peter watched them both with a chillingly satisfied smile, but there was something altogether too calculating in his expression that made Rumple’s stomach clench in fear.

He was so terribly afraid of Peter Pan, and he hated the way the boy’s eyes lingered on Belle near-constantly, these days. Rumple had never minded before, but now it made him angry: Belle was his friend, his girl, not Peter’s. Peter could go find his own. Belle was his.

\---

Belle was awoken in the middle of the night – the perpetual night, these days, all the stars were growing dimmer and the sun never shone anymore – by a hasty hand on her arm. “Wake it up, Belle, wake it up, come on!” Rumple hissed. She rolled over to see him, his dark eyes wide with panic, and she was awake instantly.

“What happened?” she asked, hazily. No one ever came into her little home, the house-tent that Peter always mockingly made for her, in honour of the house she had insisted upon building from leaves the day she had arrived on the island. That was her place, her girl-space: the place to remind her that she was not a smelly, rough lost boy but a girl who was on an adventure, thank you very much. 

Her body was more than helping with that now, though: after what she felt was at least three decades in her child’s body, Belle now felt soft on her chest and hips, the angular points of skinny childhood softening into the curves her mama had had before her.

She’d hoped it would only make her a better Mother to the growing tribe, but Peter’s eyes lingered there too, and that made Belle nervous. She wasn’t afraid of him, never had been, but she knew that the distinction between acceptable Mother and Grown Up Woman, and which side Belle’s fate would lie upon, rested entirely in his hands. The thought was unsettling: no one decided Belle’s fate but her.

“They came to my mat,” Rumple told her, “some of the other boys. They told me to stay away from you, that you’re theirs and not mine, that I don’t belong… that I never belonged.”

He was crying now, tears as fat and awful as the day they met pouring down his dirty cheeks, and Belle made a low little cry and held him to her, rocking him gently, making soothing noises. “I’m not theirs,” she confided, softly, knowing at last that every word was true, “I’m yours. You belong with me.”

He swallowed, hard, and looked at her closely, his face so close she could count his wet, black eyelashes, and feel his breath on her lips. That felt nice, she thought, to have him so close, but nice in a vibrant, warm way, like she was suddenly too hot and restless for her own skin. 

“Really?” he asked, and his voice, ever wavering between the soprano of a boy and the tenor of a young man, was low tonight, and soft, breathless. “You- you mean that?”

“Always,” she whispered, and then glanced down, at where their hands had become tangled and intertwined between them without even knowing it, “do I belong with you, too?”

He nodded, fervently, “Of course, always, forever.” She laughed, a happy and startled little thing, and found her own eyelashes wet with tears, the same as his.

It was just a moment, a little moment, and then Belle had leaned forward and pressed her lips to Rumple’s, the way she’d seen her mama kiss her papa all those years ago, the way no one ever did in Neverland. Rumple was startled, stock-still and frozen, and Belle hoped she hadn’t made a mistake, that he wouldn’t run from her now.

But then, then he kissed her back, his lips shifting against hers with gentle pressure, and his hands had come to gingerly cup her shoulders.

He slipped from her house silently, without another word, and Belle felt her fingers fly to her lips, tracing where he’d kissed her. She was so dazed, that she almost didn’t notice how dark it had suddenly become, or how the darkness cleared after only a moment; as if a shadow had passed over her little house, and then left without a word.

In any other world, Belle would have felt safe in knowing that was folly and fantasy. But she went back to sleep with fear in her heart and ice in her veins, because everything would change, now, if it hadn’t been, if they’d been seen.

\---

“I told you he was yours, if you’d only have asked.” Peter cornered Belle in the woods again, in the dim hours between the weak sunrise and the exhausted sunset, and Belle flinched.

“Who?” she asked, and oh she had a pretty way of lying, big blue eyes and innocence. Up to a point, her and Rumpelstiltskin’s little dance had been intriguing, but a line had been crossed and there was more cheating afoot now. They’d come too close to magic, there, and magic was Peter’s domain, and no one else’s.

“Oh come on now, Mother,” he stepped closer, “there’s no need to play games with me.” He lifted his hand, and traced a line from her traitorous, kissing lips and down, over the new slight curve of her chest, and the dip of her waist. What a difference a few years could make, when a girl started to grow. Soon her womanhood would be upon her, and she’d be a grown up truly: she already stank of noble lies and maturity, and age, and all the other nasty habits that Peter had banned from Neverland entirely. “You know, you’re not bad like this,” he snickered, and felt her tell tale flinch once more, “all ripe and fresh like a peach.”

She batted his hand away, “I’m the same as I always was.”

He laughed at that, “Oh, so is Rumpelstiltskin the only boy allowed in your fruit basket? And here I thought you belonged to us all, Mother,” he sneered at her, and saw her colour rise, and oh now she was afraid, at last, finally. “If you’re going to start handing out affections, then it’s only fair to treat us all the same. Can’t be playing favourites now, how would that be fair?”

“What are you talking about?” she snapped, angry fire flaring in her eyes, “Do I not hug Felix or Donny enough, or tend enough of your wounds after you make them fight? What have I done wrong this time?”

“You owe a kiss to every boy in camp,” Peter told her. “You owe it to us all to open your door, and allow us in to touch you in the night. Anything you offer to one, you offer to all. You are still ours, aren’t you?” It was a challenge, thrown at her feet: accept that things are different, or suffer the consequences.

“I won’t do that,” she told him, firmly. “No one decides my fate but me.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” he hissed, maliciously, right in her face. Then he softened, smiled, his hand once again tracing the lovely curve of her cheek, “Is this how close you let him, Belle?” he asked her, softly, “Your Rumpelstiltskin? Did you let him touch you, too?”

“What do you want from me?” she asked, softly, tremulously. “What will make you happy, Peter?”

“I want our Mother back,” he told her.

“I never left,” she promised, and he wanted to squeeze the blood from her lying throat but oh, he could find a worse fate for her than that, if he was only patient. “I’m right here.”

“Then kiss me,” he challenged, “right here: kiss me like you kiss your lover, Mother.”

She took a deep breath through her nose, and he knew this was the moment of decision, where she chose one cruel fate or another, and never knowing until it was done. It was the moment he lived for, and he felt it sing in his blood, that flash of a choice made, for no one decided her fate but her, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t hurt either way.

Then she surged forward, and kissed him hard on the lips, briefly and without tenderness or sweetness, or even want, but with all the anger and frustration she had.

“Belle?” 

Right on cue, and Peter grinned as Belle released his shirt from her fists. She turned, horrified, to see Rumpelstiltskin stood behind them, the firewood Felix had ordered him to gather dropped and scattered at his feet.

“Mother is so wonderfully free with her affections,” Peter praised, stepping around her and sidling off into the forest, past Rumpelstiltskin, “Isn’t she Rumple?”

\---

Rumple ran blindly into the forest, shaking Belle’s hand from his shoulder and hoping, truly, to stumble into a patch of dreamshade and die there and then. Anything would hurt less than this. Anything would hurt less than knowing that Peter Pan now owned everything he had ever valued, that she still belonged to him utterly. That he mattered nothing to her.

He could hear footsteps behind him, but he didn’t turn. He stopped, instead, and ducked behind a tree, fumbling at his belt for his little knife. He wanted to kill someone, and Peter wouldn’t care who it was. Murder was just another game for a lost boy.

He spun, and his knife stopped a fraction of an inch from Belle’s slender throat. One twitch, and he’d have her blood on his hands. “Rumple,” she whispered, breathless and desperate. She ignored the knife at her throat, and threw her arms around him, “I’m so sorry,” she whispered, shaking, trembling, and his knife fell to the floor at her feet, and his heart with it. It was hers, anyway: it had always been hers. “I’m so, so sorry Rumple.”

“Why?” he asked, “Belle, why?”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have betrayed you like that. I love you.”

He froze, and took in the clean fabric of her tunic, the too-soft waves of her hair, and how young she was again, how sharp her bones were once more, how pale her skin. “You’re not real,” he whispered, stunned, heartbroken, “You’re not real.”

“What?” she lifted her tear-stained face to him, “Rumple, don’t say such things! I’m so afraid… you’ll protect us, won’t you? Take us far away from here?”

“You’re not real!” he roared at her, and for the first time in his life, Rumpelstiltskin was not a boy but a man, with a man’s shout, a man’s broken heart.

The change was instant, and chilling.

“No,” she whispered, her tears gone, her smile sickening, “But I’m all you have left.”

She vanished, a puff of smoke in the dank air, and he sank to the ground, shaking all over, his hands to his dirty face and retching, sobbing like the child he could never be again. 

“Only grown-ups dream of lost lovers,” Peter Pan crooned, from behind him. “And grown-ups can’t stay in Neverland.” He knelt by Rumpelstiltskin’s head, and leaned in close, “Leave while you have the chance.” He grabbed Rumpelstiltskin’s hand and pressed something into it, something cool and small and round. “Go.”

“Not without her,” Rumpelstiltskin ground out, “I won’t go without her. I won’t leave her here with you.”

“You have no choice, laddie,” Peter taunted, “No one can leave without my permission, and we need our Mother. And she’ll be ours again, with you gone. That is what she chose,” he confided, at a whisper, “I offered you to her, and she chose us instead. You saw it with your own eyes, remember?” he laughed, and Rumpelstiltskin flinched, “Thank you for teaching her kissing, by the way,” he said, “it’ll make things much more fun around here.”

“I won’t go,” Rumpelstiltskin swore, “I won’t.”

“You’re free to stay, of course, but only as a grown-up. And you know what happens to them, don’t you laddie?”

Of course he did: he’d woven hanging-ropes and cages with his own hands. The few adults who found their way to Neverland didn’t leave, and death was a mercy that they almost always begged for, before it came.

And Rumpelstiltskin, son of a coward, did not want to die.

“Throw it to the ground, and think of home,” Peter Pan told him, “and jump.”

\---

Belle waited, for hours, by the fire. Peter came back, threw her a satisfied smile, and the other boys filtered in from their hunts and their games in twos and threes. But there was no Rumple. Her heart ached, her cheeks burned, her mouth felt dirty and bruised, but Rumple did not come. 

She dared not ask Peter, either, so she waited. Days on end, she waited, and still there was nothing. No one mentioned him, and he did not come home.

Sometimes boys camped in the woods for a few days, licked their wounds after a fight. But after a week, Belle began to sicken at the thought of where he could have gone, of what might have happened. If anything had happened to him, she didn’t know what she would do.

“Where is he?” she asked, at last. Peter raised an eyebrow at her.

“Who?”

“Rumple,” she said, “He… he’s not come back in a week.”

Peter considered, “How much is the information worth?”

Belle sighed, “What do you want?”

His eyes glittered, “A kiss. You don’t kiss anyone anymore, Mother.”

“A kiss,” she agreed, “And you tell me where Rumple is.”

“Of course,” he grinned, and pulled her to him, pressing his lips hard and violent against hers. He held her for a long time, and she felt branded and invaded by his kiss. It was as if he strove to make it as unpleasant, as possessive and cruel as a kiss could be.

Finally, he released her, and she made a show of wiping her lips on her sleeve. “Now?”

“He went home,” Peter said, simply. “You made him grow up, Mother,” he accused, “your kisses turned the boy into a man, and he chose to run away rather than to risk his life by staying.” He considered a moment, a finger pressed to his chin, “Say, he didn’t even say goodbye, did he? He always did have poor manners,” he brushed past her, as if their conversation had ended, “you should have raised him better, Mother.”

Belle just stared at her feet, and tried not to break. That was what Peter wanted, and so she wouldn’t move an inch. Not until she could shrink back down to the little girl she used to be, unknowing of love or this depth of pain, and hide her newly broken parts from view.

She wasn’t going to stay. This she decided as the weeks passed, the months, as she now kissed the boys goodnight and Peter took everything from her, piece by piece, everything she cherished. She was communal property, now, and where once she had admired Peter for taking in the homeless and helpless, she now saw only a monster’s face. She was not a Mother anymore, she was just a little girl, and a cautionary tale to any who started to grow up, any who felt something which children should not.

Finally, at last, she ran away. It was perhaps a decade after Rumple left, if Neverland’s time could be trusted, and Belle ran into the forest, clutching Peter Pan’s own cloaking talisman to her chest. She didn’t look back.

\---

Rumpelstiltskin finished sawing off his own shadow, and sent it away with the dagger. He wouldn’t need it anymore, not here, and if Pan found it the costs could be disastrous. The last thing anyone needed was a demonic little boy with the Dark One in thrall.

He sat back down on a rock, and examined the doll in his hands. He hadn’t seen it since he was a boy, since just before the Shadow had come, and it had fallen from his hands to the dirt floor of what had passed for his bedroom. He stared at it, turned it from his hands, and tried to puzzle its meaning. All the things that Pan could have sent him, to break it, to hurt him, to make him kneel, and he sent this.

He almost didn’t see the small figure, slight and deft, ran past him in a hooded cloak and snatch the thing from his hands. “That doesn’t belong to you, dearie!” he cried, and gave chase, catching a warm body about its waist and turning it.

And stopped, dead, in his tracks.

He was never supposed to see her again. He’d left her behind, and in his shame and his fear he’d never thought to come back, not even after he became the Dark One, and could have rescued her. 

“Belle,” he murmured, stunned, wonderstruck. Her look was uncomprehending.

“Do I know you?” she asked, and he fell to his knees. He wrapped his arms about her middle, and buried his face in her soft stomach. She was just as she had been when he last saw her, a girl on the cusp of something else, slight curves and slight secrets in her smile, but still a child. He’d forced her to remain in that stasis, because it had taken both of them to break Neverland’s spell, and begin to grow again.

“Belle,” he sobbed, again, broken, “Belle.” He didn’t care if she was an illusion, if she was a vision sent again to torment him. He’d not seen the girl his boyhood self had loved in over three centuries, and now she was here again. “Please be real,” he murmured, “Please, please, just this once, please be real.”

For why would Pan send a vision who did not know him? Why not have her be scared, tormented, tortured, a distraction? Or worse, loving and warm, a temptation to stay where he was and make up for lost time?

He was 300 years old, and before that a grown man and a father, but now he was a lad of perhaps fourteen again, and the girl he’d loved so much had her hands gingerly in his hair.

“I’m sorry, I saw your camp, I hoped this might be a talisman or a portal… I don’t know you.”

“No, you wouldn’t,” he murmured, taking it on faith, hoping it would be enough. “I’ve aged somewhat since we last met, my dear.”

“Will you let me go?” she asked, and he shook his head.

“Never again,” he said, softly, meaning it: he was going to die here, but maybe if he got her safely to Emma and her family, maybe they could get her out with Henry. Maybe this time he could save her, the girl he’d given up out of fear, and longing for the home that didn’t want him. He had to wonder how much better his life could have been, how much sweeter, if he’d dared to find her and take her with him. If he hadn’t been such a coward, and for once been as brave as she had always so effortlessly been. “I belong with you, you belong with me, remember?”

She frowned, as if trying to remember a fleeting dream, a detail that refused to be pinned down. “Who are you?”

“My name is Rumpelstiltskin,” he told her, gently. Her eyes cleared, and then narrowed with suspicion as she took him in. Finally, they filled with tears, and her smile widened and trembled.

“Wh-what? That’s impossible.”

“Magic, sweetheart,” he said, “it has its uses.”

“Tell me something,” she demanded, “something only you could know. I’ve been hiding so long… so long… Peter sometimes finds me and plays tricks.”  
“Sometimes, I used to call you ma’am to annoy you,” he said, softly, trying to pick an insignificant detail, one she’d remember and Peter Pan would have forgotten. “You’d scold me, and call me a wretched boy.”

She stared at him for a long moment, and Rumpelstiltskin could barely stand the pain in her eyes. What had he done, in leaving her here? Why was she on the run, why hadn’t Pan let her be? He’d seemed fond of her, at least, he’d hoped she’d be safe with him gone.

And then, at last, she breathed his name, voice thick and clogged with tears, “Rumple.” She threw herself into his arms, and suddenly he was holding her close, almost too tightly, and her tears were landing in his hair, and thoughts of lost grandsons and questing heroes and monstrous children fled because he’d found her, his Belle, the only girl in any world who had ever believed he could belong anywhere at all. Who had said he could be a hero, if he only believed.

Who had known him at his weakest, and loved him anyway.

He put his arms around her tight, and was finally, finally home.


End file.
